Erika D. Smith: Mayor Greg Ballard's plan to stop panhandling based more on politics than reality

Mar. 13, 2013

Fred Strader sits downtown on the corner at Maryland and Illinois, Wednesday, March 6, 2013. He says he is at this corner every day and knows everyone. Following the law, he can sit at the corner with a sign asking for money, but he leaves the walkway open and doesn't touch anyone while asking for money. / Kelly Wilkinson / The Star

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On Friday, only hours after Mayor Greg Ballard unveiled his plan to eliminate panhandling in Downtown and hours after my column arguing that he’s wrong was posted online, a well-dressed man at a bar asked me for money.

My friends and I watched as the guy managed to get $2 out of two other people standing on the Cultural Trail, walk into the bar, buy a beer and then sit down and ask us for a few bucks, too. Needless to say, we declined.

With proof of an apparent racket in hand, it would’ve been easy to change my mind. To assume that all panhandlers are con artists who are too lazy to work. To agree with my colleague Matt Tully and demand that the City-County Council follow Ballard’s lead and ban both passive and aggressive solicitations for money in the visitor-dependent Downtown area.

Sounds simple, right? Well, nothing about this issue is simple. In fact, it’s more complicated than I thought it was.

Ballard, in his State of the City address, told us: “Let me be clear: This proposed ordinance is not an attack on our homeless population. In fact, studies by the Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention found almost none of the panhandlers Downtown were actually homeless. The activities of these panhandlers are designed to prey upon the charitable instincts of Hoosiers and our guests. They exist for their own profit, not for the charitable benefit of the less fortunate.”

That is politics.

This is the truth:

“People who are panhandling, most of us wouldn’t want to trade places with them. They’re not living the glamorous life,” said Christy Shepard, executive director of the Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention (CHIP). “They’re poor, they may be doubled-up (in an apartment or house) with friends. They may qualify for benefits and not know about it or know where to apply. They might have mental illness or substance abuse problems.”

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Are there con artists harassing people for money? Sure! That guy who asked if I could “help a brother out” last week was most definitely one of them.

But despite what seems to be popular belief, most panhandlers aren’t lazy, secretly well-off people who could get a job if they were just properly motivated. Seriously, why does anyone think that argument makes sense? If you had money or could get a job, would you sit in the cold, on the corner with a cup all day? I also might point out that we’re coming out of a recession and some people with master’s degrees are still working at fast-food joints.

So how can Ballard declare that most panhandlers aren’t homeless?

Who is homeless and who isn’t is largely defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s because non-profits that help the homeless, like CHIP, rely on HUD for most of their funding -- a shrinking pool of money starting next year because of the sequester -- and so they have to abide by the agency’s rules.

According to HUD, a person is homeless only if he or she is living on the street, in an unsafe environment, such as in an abandoned house or under a bridge, or in temporary housing, such as a shelter. Someone who has lost his house to foreclosure and is couch surfing from place to place wouldn’t be considered homeless under that definition, which is the one Ballard is using. If that person had a child, though, the child could be considered homeless.

Many of the panhandlers around Downtown and at highway exits may not be homeless, but they do tend to live in poverty.

Yet even that’s uncertain. The studies that Ballard has cited were conducted by CHIP in 2008 and 2009, months before Hoosiers started to feel the most dire effects of the recession. And they were conducted only in Downtown.

Who knows what the city’s panhandling population looks like now? That’s why Shepard says CHIP has chosen to remain neutral on the mayor’s plan.

The bottom line is it’s easy to get caught up in a simple solution without understanding – or even wanting to understand – the truth and the scope of the problem.

If we’re going to go down this road of banning panhandlers for no other reason than the financial viability of Downtown, we owe it to ourselves to make that decision based on the facts, not on assumptions.

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